2013 VIFF: With Three Days in Havana, actors realize 25 year dream of making own film

Katherine Monk, Postmedia News09.23.2015

Vancouver’s Tony Pantages (front in red shirt) and Gil Bellows (centre in tie) with friends in Havana. Pantages says the script was crafted in a unique way: “We split the one-page treatment into 10 sections and we wrote an email to 10 friends that were screenwriters in Hollywood and Toronto and here in Vancouver,”

Three Days in Havana, a film written and directed by Vancouver’s Tony Pantages, left, and Gil Bellows, centre. The longtime friends and actors dreamt about making a movie 25 years ago.

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Tony Pantages still remembers the day it all started: He and his fresh-faced acting buddy Gil Bellows were sitting in a cove near Tofino, making a movie about suicidal fishermen, when they both realized they were avid storytellers.

“It was Gil’s very first acting role,” says Pantages. “I played the small-town leather jacket, the bad guy, and Gil played the younger kid who would be me once I went off to jail. Well, we bonded like crazy.

“We had this real shared love of storytelling, past just being an actor trying to get roles. We wanted to tell stories.”

Over the course of a few hours, they told each other such great yarns they saw a fuzzy road of promise open up before them.

“At one point, I turned around and went, ‘You wanna turn some of these into films?’ And we’re like, yeah, we should do that. We shook hands right there and then,” says Pantages.

“We thought we’d get film off the ground the next year, but 25 years later …”

Bellows and Pantages finally made good on their mutual promise with the recent Vancouver International Film Festival premiere of Three Days in Havana, a script that wasn’t just penned by the two actors, it’s directed by them as well.

A thriller that walks around with its belt buckle undone, Three Days in Havana has shades of Harry Lime, The Passenger and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. But it also functions as a bit of a Hangover buddy comedy, as Bellows plays a businessman who ends up in Havana and accidentally gets embroiled in a criminal plot.

Pantages says the script was crafted in a unique way: “We split the one-page treatment into 10 sections and we wrote an email to 10 friends that were screenwriters in Hollywood and Toronto and here in Vancouver, and let them all see each other on the CC, and wrote a note saying I know you all get $1 million for 100 pages, how about $1,000 for 10? We thought if any of these guys bite, we’ll start the process.”

Two days later, they had 60 pages. Eight weeks later, they were filming.

Pantages says the story took a 180-degree turn along the way. But that has to be expected when you shoot first, and develop second: “It’s like jumping off a cliff. But it worked.”

Not only did they get the financing together, they got a great cast, including Don McKellar and Phyllida Law. They also found an entire support crew in Cuba.

“People will say no to $100 a day. But everyone says yes to Havana,” says Pantages.

The Vancouver actor, director and writer says he’s been encouraged to get behind the camera for some time.

“Directors told me I should start directing when I was still an actor,” says Pantages, who once worked as an assistant to John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) before becoming a leading music video director. “But now that I’ve done it, let me tell you how humbling it was. We thought it would be no problem at all to get a tiny film made, but it’s like moving mountains.

“I think the greatest lesson we learned is how to not know anything, and just trusting in our guts and being bold.”

Pantages says Three Days in Havana has a Canadian distributor with Eone, but he’s not sure what kind of release strategy they have planned. “All I know is we’re finished, and our subject is magnetic on the East Coast, because what Maui is to Vancouver, Havana is to Montreal,” Pantages said. “People want to see it … and I hope that soon, they can.”

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2013 VIFF: With Three Days in Havana, actors realize 25 year dream of making own film

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